A Menagerie of Vices
by Insomniac Owl
Summary: The flowers outside look exactly as they had the day before. AU. - character death -


**A Menagerie of Vices**

By Insomniac Owl

When they bury the body there is a laburnum tree blooming in the backyard, and for a long time afterward the scent of its flowers sickens her. But of course, after that a lot of things sicken her. Porcelain cups can do it, and the white skin of Sasuke's hands, and the windowpanes she presses her palms to each morning to test herself. She feels graves and stopped blood in their coolness, which is too much like the coldness of death.

"You don't understand, Sakura," Sasuke had said that morning, staring blindly into his tea, "It takes all my energy, hating Itachi like this. It's... it's like the opposite of love, when you're infatuated with someone, and you keep seeing their face in your head. That's what happens to me, except I want to smash his face in with a crowbar. I can't concentrate. You can't possibly understand what it's like."

She didn't argue.

Later, of course, she'd wish she had.

**x**

She's in the backyard, hands brown with dirt from the garden, when she hears Sasuke's car pull up out front. She's talking to their neighbor and her best friend, Ino, so she doesn't think much about it, except to remember she'd locked the front door when he left that morning the way he likes her to. She notes the sound of the engine cutting off, the distant sound of the front door closing, and buries her hands in earth as she draws in one deep, slow breath. He's home.

"I think I've been with Shikamaru too long," Ino is saying, leaning over the high wooden fence from the house next door. "He's getting on my nerves."

Sakura opens her eyes, laughs. She's finished planting the honeysuckle, and sits back on her heels, wiping the dirt from her palms. "That'll happen with anyone, Ino. I'd give him some space. You… you crowd people sometimes. Maybe that's the problem."

Ino snorts. "Let me tell you who's crowding someone, Sakura: that fat ass Chouji. You know, from Shikamaru's work? He's been coming over practically every weekend, and all he does is _stare_ at me. Gives me the creeps. I mean I – oh, oh hey Sasuke." Her breath catches once, then, abruptly and brilliantly cheerful, she touches her cheek, throws a smile over Sakura's shoulder.

He's coming across the lawn, quickly, a strange, fixed expression on his face. Sakura can't read it, but it stops her from speaking, and she's halfway to her feet before he's two steps from the door. He's wearing his work clothes – shirt and tie – but it's only two; he shouldn't be home for another hour.

Ino hangs an arm over the fence, popping her gum. "What's up?" she asks Sasuke, smiling. She tosses her hair over one shoulder as he approaches, but he hardly acknowledges her. There's something strange in his eyes, something which, again, Sakura can't make out; he looks normal enough, but...

Urgency. There's an urgency in his face, his eyes, his long steps. He crosses the yard in five or six strides, stopping when he's barely a foot away.

"Sakura," he breathes. "I need to tell you something."

Ino stops popping her gum, leans over the fence a little more. "Hey," she says. "What happened to your shoes?"

Again Sasuke doesn't acknowledge her, doesn't speak or even glance in her direction. He's focused on something, Sakura knows, something else. He used to get like this when he studied for university exams, skipping meals and sleep, drinking coffee until his hands trembled.

"Inside," he says, taking Sakura's wrist. "Please."

"I'll see you later," she tells Ino, and waves over her shoulder. Ino waves back, and after a few seconds she disappears behind the fence. She's still there, Sakura knows, watching through the gaps in the fence, but there isn't much she can do about it, and anyway she's more curious about Sasuke. His back is to her, but she can see his reflection in the back door: lips pressed together, eyes perfectly unreadable.

He leads her through the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, stopping at the foot of the stairs where he glances around several times, searching for eavesdroppers. The house is quiet. She can't hear the refrigerator or a clock. She can't hear anything. Sasuke presses her to the wall, blue floral patterns against the back of her head, the stairwell winding up into dim stillness just a few feet away. There is something just a little bit wild in his eyes, and for the first time Sakura notices he's missing his shoes.

"Your shoes," she says. "What happened to them?"

Sasuke doesn't answer. He grips her shoulders for a moment, hard enough to hurt, and then he exhales. That wild look hasn't left him. Instead there is a smile coming over his lips, and for one, crazed instant she is sure he'll burst into laughter.

"I've killed him," he says. His gaze is steady. He adjusts his hands on her shoulders, licks his lips. "I've killed him."

For a moment her face freezes, a blank mask with its lips parted. There are sounds, surely, but she can't hear them; the absence presses against her, and Sasuke's face seems to come at her like something from a dream. Then she, too, exhales, and everything begins to seep back, shoring up the edges of something she wasn't aware had broken. Edges and sounds seem clearer and more delicate.

"We'll have to bury him," she says.

Sasuke nods, hands still on her shoulders.

"Yes."

**x**

The dirt is soft and cool in her hands, but it feels wrong. A vague unease has been creeping up on her over the course of the day, ever since Sasuke whispered he'd killed his brother, and now it's spilling out of her. On the outside, at least, she's holding herself together, but she's tired. It's only a matter of time before her mind gives out. There are long streaks down her thighs where she wiped her hands clean of grave dirt, and she can't stop looking at them, can't stop thinking there should be flowers and roots in her fists, not a shovel the size of her head. She feels filthy and she's hardly touched a thing.

"Sakura." Sasuke's disembodied voice emerges from behind a mound of dirt and potting soil, "I need you to shift this pile of dirt. The hole needs to be longer, and your crocuses are in the way. And are you watching for the neighbors?"

"Yes." She's shaking, her voice and her hands and her knees, but she gathers a breath of air and does as Sasuke asks. He, of course, is dirtier than she is, since he's digging the grave; there's dirt clinging to his back, and smeared into his hands and his knees and the cuffs of his shirt. She wonders how he stands it.

The pile of dirt grows higher.

When Sasuke finishes, the hole as deep as he is tall. He lifts himself out and, hands and the knees of his pants smeared with dirt, and makes a quick round of the yard to check on the neighbors. Satisfied, he heads around the side of the house toward the car for the body. She envies his calm. He walks like he's retrieving a forgotten change of clothes or briefcase while she waits, holding the side gate open, fighting just to keep her breathing even.

The body's draped in a sheet when he lifts it from the trunk, but she can still make out a head, torso, waist and knees, all the places where the body bends. There's no hiding what it is. She pulls the gate closed as Sasuke comes through again, and in the process the sheet slips and Ita – his brother's hand bumps against her arm, cold fingers pressing, just for a moment, against her skin. He's more substantial than she'd expected. Heavy. Like he'd been filled with water and it's all weighing him down.

The hand swings away, bobbing pleasantly; her thoughts start to blur and a thick shudder rises up inside her. _No_, she thinks, clutching at the gate for support. _No_. Vomit rises in her mouth, but she swallows it down, acid burning at the back of her throat.

She'll try to forget the feel of those fingers, but of course it stays. Smaller, more innocent things will remind her, and she'll feel death in glass vases, and chain link fences, and the concrete steps in front of their house. In the days and weeks ahead, she will feel death everywhere. It will come to her in bright flashes, along with images transposed from this night: the stars, the curve of Sasuke's back as he leans to drop his brother in his grave, the thin lines of tree branches and the way the sheet flutters up as the body falls. The sick, heavy thud it makes when it hits the ground.

Sasuke fills the grave up quickly, the extra dirt spread out over the rest of the garden. To the casual observer – and to Sakura too, if she hadn't known better - nothing seems to have changed. It looks the same as it always does, except for the missing flowers, but Sasuke is putting those back too, one by one, as carefully as an artist.

He's still in his socks, Sakura notices suddenly, the soles caked in dirt.

"Do you want me to pick you up a new pair of shoes tomorrow?" she asks. "It hasn't been too long since you bought the other ones; maybe they'll have that same pair."

Sasuke finishes one plant and reaches for another. "Sure."

He's working slowly, methodically, treating each flower like a secret. He does everything like this – thoroughly – and Sakura finds herself wondering, almost against her will, if he killed his brother like this too. Was he as thorough about murder as he is about relocating these flowers, or was he messy; did he stab him twelve times, mop up the blood, and drag him away?

His hands are black with soil, dirt and vermiculite clinging to his fingers. Carefully he presses each flower into place, working dirt around the stems until they sit on neat, low-sloping hills. When he's done he keeps kneeling, palms pressed deep into the soil, and Sakura wonders if he's trying to feel his brother's body down there, six feet below his hands, and wonders if he knows he won't be able to.

**x**

"How did it happen?" she asks him later, as the sun's just starting to rise. Unable to sleep, they'd wound up at the kitchen table, sipping tea and, every now and then, because they can't help themselves, glancing out toward the garden. It's dim and grey and still, the sun hidden on the other side of the house, but she can make out the important details: the dirt, the rows of red poppies, the crocuses the colors of bruises.

"Sasuke? How'd it happen?"

"...Quickly."

Sasuke pauses, and then he looks up, skin a rich gold in the lamplight. There's something in his eyes she can't quite identify, and in the silence that follows he runs his tongue over his lips, runs his fingers over his cup.

Outside in the garden, those neat rows of flowers look exactly as they had before.

**x**

"...Sakura? What are you doing?"

There is dirt under her fingernails and smeared across her bare knees, and Ino's voice barely registers. Sakura tears another poppy from the ground, drops it onto the growing pile beside her. She's gotten through the roses and most of the poppies, and she took a pair of pruning shears to the laburnum tree about ten minutes ago. The branches are thoroughly mangled, ugly without their bright flowers and leaves; it probably won't live, and this satisfies her. Such beautiful things shouldn't be growing on top of the worst secret she has ever had to keep.

"Sakura? Hey Sakura! Aren't you listening to me?"

She spares a glance toward Ino, who is leaning with both arms over the fence and her perfect eyebrows drawn together, but she doesn't respond. Instead she clutches another poppy in her fist, tears, and moves a few feet to her right to start on the crocuses.

"Are… are you okay?" Ino asks, leaning still closer. "What are you doing that for? Sakura?"

"Sakura."

Sasuke's voice stops her cold. She raises her head to find him standing in the doorway: perfectly calm, perfectly composed, in a white collared shirt and grey pants and no tie. He's home early again.

She gets slowly to her feet, blue crocuses dangling from her fingers, which she drops as she makes her way toward the door. A lump has risen in her throat and there's a funny tickling sensation at her eyes and nose, but she is dry-eyed until she gets into the house, until Sasuke closes the door, and then the blinds, behind her.

He turns sharply then, mouth a thin line, but other than that he is remarkably composed. His hands clench into fists but he doesn't move; his body is entirely, perfectly self-contained.

"What are you doing?" he hisses. "You might as well have told her what we did. Behavior like that will bring the police right to us, Sakura, you should know that!"

She can't help it; she chokes back tears and ends up with her head in her hands, pulling in shallow cut-off breaths between sobs. "I'm sorry," she says.

In the dim light afternoon light it looks like Sasuke might be about to say something, but she can't be sure. He stares at her for a while, then moves around the bar into the kitchen where he leans, back toward her, against the counter. She thinks he might sigh, thinks he might rub his eyes, but again she can't be sure. It's more likely that he's staring out the window with absolutely no expression on his face, arms and ankles neatly crossed, considering ways to safeguard their freedom should Ino go to the police.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. There is dirt under her fingernails, black and wet against her skin, and when she apologizes she's not sure if she's sorry for pulling up the flowers, or for her role in Itachi's death.

Either way, the words come out the same.


End file.
